Musings

In the past week, I did my first hiring and my first firing.

The plan to make money using Sillyz was never kids. It was never dweb. Both are predatory and neither are sustainable.

The plan to monetize Sillyz was always to beat up Microsoft and take their lunch money. The same as they've always done to me.

That is sustainable.

I started the official project of spinning Sillyz off into a more legit enterprise to get HIPAA compliance to demonstrate the superior (to Microsoft) privacy protections of my personal computer as it relates to the enterprise space. My first hiring.

Sillyz was always a joke, but a joke that was too legit to quit. The premise is, Steve Jobs died and the world got sad that he didn't do magic tricks at Worldwide Developers Conference once a year anymore to stave of Microsoft's antics. If he had the time to do one final show, it would be to reveal the pinnacle of Apple engineering: A sticky note.

To understand Sillyz, we need to understand the Internet Archive. To understand the Internet Archive, we need to understand the Internet. To understand the Internet, we need to understand the Grateful Dead.

Before we begin, I was recently asked to step up as a leader of the San Francisco Dweb Node. That's gone terribly so far. I've never censored anyone and I've actively avoided being in a position to have had the capacity to be able to censor anyone. Alas, my first firing.

It didn't feel good. I did not like it. It was the right call.

However, to avoid any ambiguity around my conflict of interest with my new responsibilities to a global community, I'm going to censor Sillyz.Computer from all dweb contexts, which is what I wish everyone that's been a community organizer with a technology pony in the dweb race would have done when they were in my shoes— instead of co-opting dweb as a movement for the idea of dweb as a platform.

The truth is, my computer is not what got me invited to help volunteer more deeply, and let's be clear, Sillyz to date has brought me no income since I lost my job at Netflix in June of 2022 and I've never taken any money from the Internet Archive or dweb or anyone at all for that matter.

As far as A/B testing goes, my Clown has far outpaced my Computer in adoption. People love my clown, but are very suspicious of my computer.

For anyone that's followed along so far, thank you. I don't want to leave you hanging. In more professional contexts, I refer to Sillyz as Sillyz/plan98— a tongue in cheek reference to gnu/linux.

Plan98 is the codebase that powers all of my domains, Sillyz being just one. They are all powered by the elves, the core engine in my boot to web philosophy. Plan98 has grown fairly complex organically by battle testing it with any compatible technology I find, of which, dweb has many.

I wouldn't want to pass Plan98 off to a kid in the current state of affairs and if I'm never going to platform Sillyz.Computer again the dweb movement, I'd feel much better whittling it down into the core of my contributions in the space that can be taken or left— it doesn't matter to me.

Why doesn't it matter? My plan was never to monetize kids or dweb— both vulnerable populations to technologists. My plan is to beat up Microsoft and steal their lunch money using this fresh take on sillyz and you can do it too. If you do or don't, again, it doesn't matter to me.

This is Plan 1 and it always has been: felling Microsoft with the sticky note that Steve Jobs never got to release.

This raw ambition is what brought my clown to fruition.

If you click this link, currently hosted by Microsoft by no fault of my own, but poetic in nature, https://github.com/tylerchilds/plan1, you will be taken to the code for Plan 1.

The code works by running

deno task start

which will initialize the process manager in mod.js. In plan98, this is where all micro services are managed from. In plan1, it starts only a web server that is an edge client, client.js.

If you did that, http://localhost:8000/admin will give you an inclination of how a traditional enterprise web application can devolve lovingly into what has become of sillyz/plan98.

If you right click anywhere on the page and “Inspect”, you will open the developer tools. This is where I spend the vast majority of my time as a distributed systems architect.

By going into the “Debugger” tab, then the “Sources” panel, in the “Main Thread” tree, find the “Elves” directory. Compare that to the code in the Plan 1 codebase. It is identical. What you see is what you get.

The elves are the tiny adhesive required to keep the entire system highly aligned and loosely coupled.

That's really all there is to say about Sillyz. Everything else was a joke I wrote on a sticky note to entertain dweebs that I greatly respect and deeply admire.

It is easy for me to let Sillyz be relegated to a hobby according to the IRS after three years, as it is finished and doesn't need to consume my every waking moment anymore. The nightmare of becoming a clown is over.

It is incredibly freeing to be able to let my clown emerge from the grave of my computer and to not take up any space and time as a technologist that is better utilized by others in the dweb movement.

To understand Sillyz, we need to understand the Internet Archive. To understand the Internet Archive, we need to understand the Internet. To understand the Internet, we need to understand the Grateful Dead.

Jerry Garcia started on a Banjo. A fact I never knew until after I bought a Banjolele on December 3rd, 2024— the day I was put on the watchlist I spent the past three years building Sillyz to defend against.

Jerry liked to jam. Dark Star is the quintessential improvisational track of The Grateful Dead— A song that an album version or radio edit could never do justice to. Personally, I've never experienced Dark Star, but the general sentiment around the defining element of the song is best expressed in this Phil Lesh quote:

“Dark Star” is always playing somewhere. All we do is tap into it.

Beyond the Grateful Dead's ability to put on a different show every night like Penn and Teller, was their willingness to allow people to dial into their shows remotely across time and space.

When labels had every other artist in torture chambers, the Dead let anyone record their shows. They even had dedicated sections for recording artists to not disrupt the live audience. These recordings were encouraged to be proliferated, which turned free will into free marketing.

The power of the Dead was collective. Each individual had a technical prowess that was unparalleled. Together, they were an unstoppable force of nature. But the band wasn't just the performers on the stage, the band was everyone.

The Dead would attract people from all walks of life, but their technical abilities drew the attention of some of the brightest minds at universities across the country at a time when computer networking was emerging.

When it used to take 50 hours to drive recordings 3000 miles across the states, the computers made it much faster and less limited by paved, monitored roads. As the demand for access to the latest Grateful Dead music grew, the computer researchers across the United States delivered the internet.

The README in the Plan1 repository holds information of little value to anyone that knows what the six letters README should mean, as far as internet history goes.

A love letter to the grateful dead internet hypothesis.

To understand Sillyz, we need to understand the Internet Archive. To understand the Internet Archive, we need to understand the Internet. To understand the Internet, we need to understand the Grateful Dead.

The Dead Internet Theory isn't a reproducible scientific experiment the way the word theory intends, but the superstition is as follows:

The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity.

I hate to admit it, but the internet that began by connecting fans of The Grateful Dead across time and space has become a breeding ground for trolls, bots, and shills. A shill would be the closest coined term to describe how I perceive Sillyz to be perceived in the internet spaces I inhabit. We cannot control how our gifts are received, we can only give them.

So if the Internet is dead, but not because of The Grateful Dead, where did it all go wrong and is their any way to save it?

One of my favorite jokes is about Brewster Kahle, the head librarian and progenitor of The Internet Archive.

It goes like this, “The Internet Archive was created to store Brewster's Grateful Dead collection. It just happened to be good at a lot of other things too.”

The Internet Archive cannot store everything on the internet as the Dead Internet Theory implies there are malicious actors flooding the internet in an effort to undermine the humanities. I'll avoid the digression about artificial intelligence, large language models, and generative pre-trained transformers as they are 2+2 for the dead internet theory and I don't want to insult your intelligence in explaining that joke, dear reader.

Instead of archiving everything generated ever, the mission of the Internet Archive is “Universal Access to All Knowledge”, which I've come to understand as defending the humanities against the machines in an alliance with the machines that are still yet living.

To understand Sillyz, we need to understand the Internet Archive. To understand the Internet Archive, we need to understand the Internet. To understand the Internet, we need to understand the Grateful Dead.

Sillyz.Computer was created to store my joke notebook. It just happens to be good at storing all sorts of other things too.

The Grateful Dead Internet Hypothesis is as follows:

The internet as humans have come to appreciate it, is due entirely to the existence of the Grateful Dead.

To disprove the Dead Internet Theory, all we need to do is get the band back together and that's something technology will never solve, unless we include papers, boxes, and banjoleles among the ranks of the machine.